Bootstrapping to $27 Million from Arizona: Jeremy Young, CEO of Tanga (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the premise of that partnership?

Jeremy Young: Windows95.com was owned by Steve Jenkins. He was my partner in Virtual Servers. He pushed traffic from Windows95 to my company. He basically had advertisements for the web hosting product on his website.

Sramana Mitra: How big did the company grow to be?

Jeremy Young: We were at about $11 million in sales at that time.

Sramana Mitra: Was it all organic?

Jeremy Young: All organic.

Sramana Mitra: The business model was advertising?

Jeremy Young: No, it was web hosting. Windows95.com was advertising model, but we used its traffic to push people from windows95.com to Virtual Servers to buy web hosting products.

Sramana Mitra: I see. It sounds like it’s a monthly subscription fee kind of business model.

Jeremy Young: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: You sold the company to whom?

Jeremy Young: Micron Electronics.

Sramana Mitra: Why would Micron buy a web hosting company?

Jeremy Young: They were trying to turn their company from a computer manufacturing company to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company. Their whole play was to buy Internet service providers and web hosting companies, and do a big roll-up. It’s now called web.com. It’s a publicly traded company out of Florida. It’s still doing very well.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you exit?

Jeremy Young: It was December of 1999.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do next?

Jeremy Young: During that time, I had an idea. This was probably in 1998. I contacted a couple of friends of mine—Josh James and John Pestana. They were doing some web development at that time. I came up with an idea of creating a SaaS analytics company for small to medium businesses. At that time, there were not a lot of people that were doing real-time traffic analytics on websites. You might have a web trend and get a rudimentary report of your traffic. By the time you open it up, you don’t have a real-time report. You have yesterday’s report.

My idea was, “Let’s create a software-as-a-service where people can sign up.” They would allow us to put advertising on their website but in return, we would keep track of all the analytics in real time in cool, beautiful charts that were easy to understand and dissect. We created a company called SuperStats. SuperStats eventually became what you now know as Omniture. Adobe bought Omniture several years ago.

Sramana Mitra: I know Omniture well. You were a co-founder with Josh James of Super Stats, which became Omniture. Was it the same company that just changed name or was there some other roll-up?

Jeremy Young: There were several iterations. SuperStats changed the name to mycomputer.com. Eventually, Josh did a spin-out of some assets and created a more enterprise-level software service and sold off the consumer and small business side of things and focused on enterprise. That was Omniture.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping to $27 Million from Arizona: Jeremy Young, CEO of Tanga
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